Rakudo Star Release 2015.06

2015-07-01

A useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to
announce the June 2015 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the June 2015 release is
available from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/.

This Rakudo Star release comes with support for the MoarVM
backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms).

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language
("Perl 6") and specific implementations of the language such as
"Rakudo Perl". This Star release includes release 2015.06 of the
Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 2015.06 of MoarVM, plus various
modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the
Perl 6 community.

The "is cached" trait no longer works on methods, throws a NYI instead

Method .map should be used instead of .for

The REPL is strict by default now, that leaves only '-e' lines to be lax

Implement new @*INC handling (about 30% faster startup time) (bare startup time is now below 100 ms on some machines)

Implemented CUnions which map to the union C type definition for NativeCall

Implemented HAS declarator for attributes to mark it embedded into the CStruct or CUnion

Lexical pragma 'use trace' now outputs statements on STDERR

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet
handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases.
Some of the not-quite-there features include:

advanced macros

non-blocking I/O (in progress)

much of Synopsis 9 and 11

There is an online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features
that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo's
backends and other Perl 6 implementations.

In many places we've tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the
programmer that a given feature isn't implemented, but there are many
that we've missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are
welcomed at rakudobug@perl.org.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about
Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference
materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A
draft of a Perl 6 book is available as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf in
the release tarball.